Drink to forget. This is a common behaviour in humans for example, when you’re rejected, but it’s not exclusive to our species. Flies also do that. A scientific magazine (“Science”) has published it. Scientists from …

Scientists of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre, in USA, have invented a 3D printer that can create human tissues, so in the future, we will be capable of replacing ill and hurt tissues. The inventers …

Scientists of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre, in USA, have invented a 3D printer that can create human tissues, so in the future, we will be capable of replacing ill and hurt tissues.

The inventers printed structures for ears, bones and muscles, and when they implanted them in animals, they matured into functional tissues and developed vessel systems. This process could be repeated with humans in the future, for example, to create organs that will be surgically introduced.

The Integrated Tissue and Organ Printing System (ITOP), was developed during a period of 10 years by scientists of the Regenerative Medicine Institute, and it contains materials like biodegradable plastics, tissues, and gels based on water that contain cells. These materials can form a strong and provisional exterior structure.

I think that this discovery could be incredibly helpful in the future, not just for those people whose tissues are ill or hurt, but also to those patients that have to wait years until a compatible organ donor is found.

I am also very impressed by the fact that we can use a machine, in this case, a 3D printer, to make living tissues that animal’s organism accept, and probably, human’s organisms too. The concept that we can make life by using a device created by humans feels surreal to me.

In my opinion, this is a huge step in finding a cure for a lot of health problems that an enormous amount of people have to deal with.

Hopefully, in some years we will not depend on organ and tissue donations, but instead have the option to replace the ill parts of our body using a 3D printer.

Well, the cells are basic for life, dear grandpa. They are like little bugs. We can’t see them with a naked eye, but they’re here. All of the humans are made up of cells, the animals, the plants…

There are different types of cells. Plants and seaweeds… have got plant cells, and the animals, and the humans… have got animal cells.

But these little bugs must eat, and we feed them by the food that we ingest. The food is broken down in the digestive apparatus and transformed into nutrients, units smaller than the food ingested. In this way, the nutrients can go throught the blood and arrive to the cells.

These organisms also breathe, and when we breathe, they breathe to. The oxygen that we have, is transmitted (by the blood again) to the cells and these units expels CO2 to the medium.

They eat, breath, and they also transform this resource to obtain energy, but that, dear grandpa, is other story.

Cells are composed of organelles, parts of the organism that perform these functions.

The first one was the strongest, with an intensity of 3.2 degrees on the Richter scale. It took place in the Atlantic Ocean, next to the Death Coast, at 9:30 p.m.

A few hours later, specifically, at 11:28 p.m., another earthquake took place in the Atlantic Ocean; but this time closer to the coast and with an intensity of 2.1 degrees.

However, these weren’t the only earthquakes that happened that day. There were two other: the first one in Zafarraya (Málaga), with 3.4 degrees; and the other one, in Salar y Loja (Granada), which was the second of that day and the third one in a series of earthquakes that happened in just three days in that zone.

Also, a third earthquake took place in Galicia the next day, in As Nogais (Lugo), with an intensity of 1.5 degrees.

Why do these earthquakes occur? Because if we think about it, Galicia isn’t an area characterized for them, and if there is any, it is usually soft, because the continental crust of our zone has a large percentage of granite on its composition and it is difficult to move it a lot. In the last 15 years, there were just about 80 earthquakes of more 2 degrees on the Richter scale.

The reason of these movements is the divergent boundary between the North American and the Eurasian plate, because minor earthquakes are one of the characteristics of these boundaries as the tectonic plates move apart.

In the last 15 days the IGN (Instituto Geográfico Nacional) detected two earthquakes in Galicia thanks to the seismographs.
The epicentre of this first earthquake was located the 9/10/15 in the latitude: 43.4725 and in the longitude:-9.6420, 5 kilometres underground in the Atlantic Ocean near to Galicia at 19:30:19. The magnitude of this earthquake was 2.7 and affected the ocean and some points of the galician coast.

In this image you can see better

The persons who live in this cities didn’t feel the earthquake because the magnitude of it was low and didn’t cause any slight damage.

The epicentre of the second earthquake was located the 14/10/2015 in the latitude : 43.1867
and in the longitude : -9.0233, 11 kilometres underground in Laxe at 22:17:30.The magnitude of this earthquake was 3.2 and affects places near to Laxe, Malpica , San Roque, Zas, Vimianzo and Caramiñas.

Some persons who live in this area felt the earthquake because some objects in their houses started to move which produced some slight damages.

On Tuesday 3rd February, we went to Santiago with the departments of French Language and Bilingual, where we visited LaSalle’s theater to watch a play in French. Then, before lunch, we went to the Natural Museum, where the French pupils were guided by our teacher in this language. And we, the bilingual pupils, stayed in a room of rocks and minerals, because we were preparing the Geologic Olympic Games, and we need to know a lot strange names about geology. We also met Sarah Phillips, who is Ana’s friend, and she guided us in English through the different exhibitions like a huge map with the most common rocks in Galicia’s different regions, a big mockup of the soil or models of crystallization (with about three thousand pieces!).The thing that I liked the most was the different colors of the rocks that were there. My favorite rock is the agate, and there was a pretty one there.There were a lot of beauty minerals and crystals, and we enjoyed the tour so much. I hope I can go back again!

The Dress, was the more commented in several weeks. If we talk about “The Dress” everybody will know that we are talking about the most famous dress in the world, the most polemic dress in the history of humans, and also the topic most discussed in the last years.

What colour is this dress? What do you think? The girl, who asked her friends about the colour of the dress, didn’t think that this could separate the entire world in two teams “White and Gold” and “Black and Blue”. She decided to upload the image into the interne, because her friends cannot determine the colours. Most families in Spain and in many countries, had a huge trouble, it was an illogical discussion. Some famous people and singers have also talked on the social networks, giving their opinion.

People tried to find the solution saying that the colour depends on the screen of the mobile, tablet or computer but scientists had the solution, the culprit is our brain, it’s just an optical illusion. It depends on our eyes and our retina, objects don’t have an specific colour it depends on how the humans see the world. The people who see the dress white and gold is because their brains associate that when the photo was taken the dress was covered by a dark shadow, so their filters tried to compensate for this; changing the dark colours to light colours. But the people who see it in black and blue it’s because their brains work in a different way, and they interpret that there’s more light on the image so they change the colours, in the opposite way of the other people.

When the owners of the shop, where the dress was sold, discovered all this trouble, they published the images of their magazine, where we can see that the real dress is black and blue. The shop triplicates their benefits only in two days.

The last 11th of February I have been in a Olympiad about Geology in Santiago de Compostela with three of my classmates, some weeks ago our teacher tell us if we wanted to go to this contest, although we knew that we would have to work a lot we decided to accept the “challenge”. Besides we knew that all of the participants would be older than us and they would be better prepared, just because they had some months to study and we only had some weeks; this was the main disadvantage. Even so, we tried to be the best group.
When we got to the Santiago, we had to go to the Biology College in order to meet Ana, our biology and geology teacher. This “competition” was only for people from the province of A Coruña, there were eighty students from different cities and towns. It consisted in two exams, the first was in group and the second one was an individual test.
In the first part we listened to the organizer of the activity and then we had to do an exam about maps, then we had to identify some rocks and minerals, it was a lit bit difficult but then we had time to relax, because it was the time to eat. When we finish we went for a walk, just to think in other things. At three o’clock we had to start the individual test, this was even more hard than the first one, probably most of my answers will be wrong but I tried to do the best I could. After this we visited the labs of the college and we attended some explanations one of them about the soil, because 2015 is the year of soil. When they talk about soil we learnt a lot of things some of them we have learned it the previous week in a trip to a natural history museum in the same city.
The winner of the Olympiad will go to Alicante to represent Galicia in a national contest, and there were prizes to the best students, I mean, with the best marks in the exam. The winner was a student, who was older than us and from Santiago.
I think it was a good experience for our future, the next year I would like to go again, and I will be better prepared. In my opinion the Universities must do activities like this for students, this way they can have an idea of what they want to study when they finish compulsory education.